When Kennedy got shot I was deep into my studies in electronics at my work bench, only a third year student in high school. I had several television sets to refurbish to make operational. So I had the chance to see a few channels reporting the news at one time. I was devastated at the news.
Now, reflecting on political people and knowing there is greed here in America that exists with the passion to murder a president, any president that does not play the game. America has a very vicious a very connected inner society that is isolated from the general mass population. Loaded with business money changers, domestic, and foreign that tilt the fair play in life.
When you listen to Kenney’s famous words “Ask not what your country can do for you”. Yes parsing this a little in this first part. The Syntax of this short beginning is what is called a conditional negative.
“Ask not”, is one of the worst kinds of statements to tangle in semantics in modern language. That “not” stuff is what flourished in the sixteenth century. With that said bringing modern speech blended with old Kings English was from my view a terrible mistake that took his life away. That time of old English embodied a tyrannical conditional negative and double negative era of rhetoric. Confusion on a level that was hard to predict with the double answers that went to hell.
Think about it and the American audience at the time grieving however in a large part many thinking how could this man even suggest; Not to ask what your country can do for you! Or take the second part: Ask what you can do for your country? Does that mean pay taxes? As I really think through it, it could be interpreted as one of the most arrogant self-center egotistical statements ever made by a president. Enough to get a whole section of the country mad, perhaps the business section really upset, no they went mad and rid of him.
Please understand I adored Kennedy at the time and still do, however mainly because of the science in education he invoked in America. Two years later I enlisted in the army to become a Vietnam era veteran, I asked not but I did so do something for my country even though in my view the way Kennedy said it was totally unacceptable.
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